Antonio Molina - In the Night of Time

Sometimes he thought: you could have been one of them, your son could have been born to earn a scant wage as a bricklayer in University City or to throw rocks at the mounted guards and not study for a career. (What would Miguel study? What would he be suited for?) As a boy he’d worked with his hands during school vacations with the crews under his father, the foreman respected by his bricklayers because even if he’d prospered enough to wear a vest and jacket, he still had a face burned by weather and blunt, hard hands, and was more skilled than anyone in tracing the line of a wall with squinting eyes and no more help than a cord and a lead weight. Accompanying his father as a boy, he’d learned the physical effort demanded by each shovelful of cement and moved earth, each paving stone in its precise place, each brick in its identical row. Everything was easy, dazzling on the plan: the lines of ink and patches of watercolor culminated in a building in a couple of afternoons of joyful work, an entire city invented in a few days. Avenues crossing at right angles, receding to the vanishing point; trees in the tender greens of watercolor; small human figures to indicate scale. But in reality the figure seen through the windows of the drafting room is a man who tires easily and isn’t well fed; who left his wretched living quarters in an outlying suburb before dawn to walk to work and save the few céntimos a streetcar or the metro would have cost; who at midday eats a poor stew of garbanzos boiled in a broth made from an old bone; who could fall from a scaffolding or be crushed by an avalanche of bricks or stones and become an invalid and spend the rest of his life lying on a straw mattress in a room at the end of a foul-smelling hall while his wife and children go hungry and find themselves condemned to the humiliation of public charity. When he inspected a construction site, passively observing the physical effort of other men, Ignacio Abel became uncomfortably aware of his well-cut suit, his body fresh from his morning shower and absolved from the brutality of labor, his shoes dirtied by dust, the shoes the bricklayer bent over in a trench would see at eye level when he passed: gentlemen’s shoes, so insulting to the man who wears espadrilles. “You don’t understand the class struggle, Don Ignacio,” Eutimio had told him, the foreman who forty years earlier had been an apprentice on his father’s crew. “Class struggle is when a few drops of rain fall and your feet get wet.” He felt shame and relief, wished for social justice, and feared the rage of those hoping to make it happen through the violence of a bloody revolution. How many men had died in the Asturias uprising, how many suffered torture and prison? For what? In the name of what apocalyptic prophecies translated into the language of tabloids, at the hands of such brutal uniformed avengers, drunk on other degraded words, or not even that, mercenaries paid as miserably as the rebels they hunted down. He feared that cruelty or misfortune would crush his children, dragging them into the penury from which he’d escaped but that was still so close, like a certain, visible threat: in the scabby, barefoot children who circled the site looking for something to steal or approached the workers to beg for something to eat, who walked with their heads down, holding the hand of a father who’d been laid off. He wanted his children to become strong, to learn something about the harshness of real life, particularly the boy, so weak and vulnerable, but he also wanted to protect them beyond any uncertainty, save them forever from evil and sorrow. Sometimes he took the children to the office, especially after he’d bought the car. He took them for rides along the future avenues, pointed out the places where perhaps they would study. He’d accelerate so the wind would hit them in the face, drive to the dusty green of the Monte del Pardo, then return to University City. Their mother had dressed them as if they were going to a baptism: the boy with straight bangs across his forehead, his small man’s jacket, his loose-fitting trousers; the girl’s hair arranged with a part and a ribbon, wearing patent leather shoes and socks. He’d continue working after the other employees had left and the children played like giants in the model of the city. At home, the maids were surprised to see the señor take care of the children while the señora attended her social gatherings, the lectures and expositions at the Lyceum Club, or spent the entire day in the darkened bedroom; surprised that he would go down on all fours with the children in the hallway, or move aside the papers on his worktable to make room for their constructions of paper and cardboard and their toy car races.

It hadn’t always been this way. For a long time he wished they hadn’t been born, during anguished nights of crying and fever when he felt suffocated under the weight of his responsibility. He went far away, but with distance guilt became sharper. In Weimar, each time he saw his wife’s handwriting on a letter he was afraid he would find out that one of them was sick (surely the boy, not only younger but more fragile). At times he’d walk along the street enjoying the silence after a day of hard work and study and suddenly have the presentiment that when he reached the pensión the landlady would hand him an urgent telegram. He feared misfortune, and punishment even more. For having gone away, for not feeling homesick. For surrendering to the embrace of his Hungarian lover, who, when they had finished, pushed him away, lit a cigarette, and seemed to forget his existence. For having applied for the study grant without consulting Adela and putting off the moment of telling her in the cowardly hope he’d be turned down, avoiding both the need for courage and the certain melodrama. He was afraid of telegrams, unexpected phone calls, knocks on the door, the signs that he’d soon learn something that would ruin everything.

The wagon with wooden wheels and iron reinforcements had stopped at the low window of the porter’s lodging, and the hooves of a horse had struck the paving stones, but he didn’t look up from the notebook where he was copying an exercise in geometrical drawing, going over in ink the lines he’d previously drawn in pencil (two parallel lines, regardless of how far they extend, never meet), wetting just the tip of the nib in the inkwell to avoid the error of a blot on the white paper. It was another time, almost another century, and he was thirteen years old in the winter of 1903. (The king had been crowned a few months earlier. Ignacio Abel had seen him go by in a carriage surrounded by golden shakos with crests of feathers and noticed that he wasn’t much older than himself: the king had the long, pale face of a boy beneath the visor of his high military shako.) There was knocking at the entrance door and he didn’t look up because his mother was the one who took care of the porter’s lodging. There was more knocking, louder this time, and then he remembered that his mother had gone out, telling him to look after things. A stranger wearing a beret and a bricklayer’s smock asked for her and looked at him when he said she wasn’t in, and he was her son. He was still holding the pen with the wooden shaft when he approached the wagon where the shape covered in empty plaster sacks lay. Wagon wheels will leave two parallel lines that will never meet as they carry on bare boards that bounce over potholes a dead body covered with a sack. His father, always so agile, so impatient with his son who had vertigo when he climbed a foot or two, had broken his neck falling from a scaffold. After many years Ignacio Abel still sometimes dreamed he had to move aside the cloth of the dusty sack with the large, dark stain to see the face underneath. In the soft palm of his child’s hand the shaft of the pen broke in two, a sharp splinter piercing his sweaty skin. His guilt as a father mixed with his fear of misfortune. Vertigo in the face of those fragile lives to whom he was tied by an overwhelming responsibility was revived by his retrospective compassion for the boy who had bent his head over a notebook in that poorly lit room moments before the knocking at the door, ignorant of the fact that he was now the only child of a widowed mother, an exemplary student at the neighborhood Piarist school, rescued from a sentence to manual labor thanks not only to his intelligence but to the money his father had saved for so many years, knowing he wasn’t well, knowing he’d leave a defenseless child too delicate to earn his living as he’d done. He had been ill. When he fell from the top of the scaffolding, it wasn’t because he tripped or because of a loose board but because his heart burst.